AMERICAN HISTORY—A DEVELOPMENT OF GROUPS
All history may reasonably be regarded as a process of group minds
in conflict and association, struggle and integration. Probably
this method of study will bring out more genuine facts and a more
fundamental order of causation than political or military or economic
history alone; at the least, it presents one significant and important
mode of studying human association in both the past and present.
From this point of view, Greece was a congeries of competitive city
states, which united only against an outside foe; Israel was the
union of twelve different tribes, together with the Canaanites whom
they subdued; Rome was a product of the various organizations, the
patricians and plebeians; England the growth into each other of the
successive waves of conquest—Celts, Romans, Saxons, Normans—and the
more recent peaceful immigrants. From this point of view, the United
States is conspicuous among all nations for the number and variety of
its groups and for their union (on the whole) by a federal principle
of agreement, rather than a forcible levelling and unification from
without. And this process of group synthesis is not a modern one only,
as it is sometimes erroneously considered; it is characteristic of the
piece-meal, haphazard colonization from the very outset; it pervaded
the Revolutionary army, and was the outstanding fact that confronted
the framers of the Federal Constitution in 1787.
1.
E. B. Greene sums up the reasons for adopting the Constitution in this
way:
[60]The movement for a more effective union was partly the work of
far-sighted leaders who could look beyond state boundaries to the
larger interests of the country as a whole ... another group were
beginning to see that the weakness of Congress might have something to
do with troubles nearer home.
Thus the causes of the Federal union were the need of external defense
and the need of reconciling the many diverse groups in the population
of the new nation. These groups are summarized by Carl R. Fish:
[61]There were thirteen distinct and separate state governments,
and Vermont had its own local authority which defied the rest....
Differences in the original stock, emphasized by different physical
conditions and by the isolated life of the colonial period, had
created several great sections or divisions in the country, which had
sufficient similarity within themselves and sufficient unlikeness to
each other, to make them permanent entities, and to cause sectionalism
to be a permanent factor in American history.
He then goes on to enumerate the groups: New England, with its Puritan
English ancestry and its agriculture and fishing; the South, with
its English Episcopalians, its aristocratic ideals, its plantation
life; the piedmont country, with its independent small farmers and
self-governing townships; and in between the commercial valleys of the
Hudson, the Delaware and the Susquehanna. These again had their local
differences of character:
[62]The Hudson had been settled by the Dutch, although many English,
New Englanders, Germans and others had mixed with them. The
Delaware region was largely occupied by English and German Quakers.
The Susquehanna Valley contained a large proportion of Germans,
still using their native tongue, and also many Scotch, Irish and
English. There existed well defined interests, the mercantile, the
agricultural; the German, the Dutch and the Quakers; the city, the
country.
Beyond all these was the frontier, with its own natural conditions,
type of inhabitants, and economic problems, a democratic community
separate from all the rest.
The Constitutional convention of 1787 in Philadelphia was typical of
this situation. Every problem found divergent interests and opinions;
every solution was effected by compromise. [63]There was state jealousy
of all central authority; the opposition between large and small
states; that between the industries of the north and the agriculture
of the south; the slave trade, with its complex of moral and economic
problems; the sectionalism of the settled east and the frontier west;
the protection of the property-holding class and the satisfaction of
the radicals with their demand for liberty and equality. Every one of
these conflicts had to be settled if possible, or at least (as with
slavery) brought to a temporary status to avoid sharp struggle. There
were, of course, certain unifying factors. The majority of the settlers
were English, and most of these Protestants. The non-English speaking
elements were very largely of Teutonic blood and Protestant religion
also. There was a common political experience, and a democratic
urge typical of the frontier. Most important of all, there was an
eight-year war fought together against a common enemy and under the
same Commander-in-Chief. The American government, then, with its new
Constitution, was not a simple unity from the outset. It was rather a
highly complex unity, containing within itself many minor groups, many
different viewpoints, and many integrations of the sub-group for the
benefit of the nation as a whole.
2.
An interesting illustration of this, and for our purpose a crucial
one, is in the religious life of the thirteen original states.
Before the Revolution, the states might be divided into four groups
as regards their religious organization: there were congregational
establishments in Massachusetts and Plymouth, New Haven, Connecticut,
and New Hampshire; Church of England establishments in Virginia and
the two Carolinas; four states formerly under various regimes had had
the Church of England forced on them—Maryland, at first under Catholic
rule, but with freedom of residence for all Christians; New York and
New Jersey, which had been dominated by the Dutch Reformed Church; and
Georgia, founded with almost complete religious liberty. Only three
states had no established church—Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and its
offshoot, Delaware. Of these last, Rhode Island was founded by Roger
Williams in 1636, under the radical, not to say revolutionary principle
of complete separation of church and state, with right of residence
and citizenship for all persons, even including Jews and atheists.
Pennsylvania, chartered in 1681, was founded by William Penn, the
Quaker, with liberty of residence for all “believers in Almighty God”;
but the English government insisted on the condition that all voters
and office holders “shall be such as profess faith in Jesus Christ”
and the Protestant religion. What the new nation had, then, was not
religious liberty, but rather a clash of many different points of view.
[64]Massachusetts set up its theocratic state with its chief interest
in the Church; Virginia established its civil state, with the church
as a subject member; while Rhode Island boldly denied the purposes and
premises of both, placing an impassable gulf between the State and the
Church and relegating to the individual conscience and to voluntary
association all concern and action touching the Church and religious
matters.
What, then, should be the upshot of this confusion of religious groups,
with their ancient hatreds and prejudices, ingrown with history and
overlaid with former strife and martyrdom? It was obviously impossible
to make the United States Calvinist or Episcopal; it was necessary to
have some sacrifice of each for the good of all. But it might have
been possible to make the nation Protestant Christian, as was actually
the case with the state of New Hampshire until 1877. Various minor
causes here entered in. Warfare with England meant some opposition, at
least, to the Church of England. The distance from the actual seat of
old-world struggles, the character of the colonists and their longing
for every type of freedom, helped much. The new theories of the French
Encyclopedists, as adopted by Jefferson, certainly had great influence.
But most important of all was the existence of the many minor sects,
with the few important ones, of which all longed to rule but none
wished to be dominated by any other.
The upshot was religious freedom, the separation of church and state,
according to Article VI, Section 3, of the Federal Constitution:
“No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any
office or public trust under the United States.” This clause
was opposed on both sides—by Massachusetts as being too liberal, by
Virginia and Rhode Island as not liberal enough. Virginia had two years
before this overthrown her state church and given complete freedom of
conscience—not toleration—to all her people. The opposition even to
toleration was becoming crystallized in the words of Thomas Paine:
“Toleration is not the opposite of intolerance, but the counterfeit
of it. Both are despotisms: the one assumes to itself the right of
withholding liberty of conscience, the other of granting it.” So the
first amendment to the Constitution, adopted immediately afterward by
motion of the first Congress, and by the required two-thirds of the
states, was: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
This was tremendously significant of the growing and newly conscious
group mind of the United States of America. It was equally important
for the future of the nation and its unity in days to come. Religious
liberty was not a matter of doctrine in its inception; it was the
product of the birth and development of the group mind of the nation.
It meant the relinquishment of the racial habits, of the state laws,
of the old urge to persecute (common to almost every group, even those
who were themselves refugees from persecution), and the adoption of a
national standard to which every state, every church and every sect
should bring its sacrifice. And if this sacrifice was not of their
own right to live, but only of the right to make others miserable,
it was nevertheless the sacrifice of something so important that
the demand had convulsed France, Germany and England not many years
before. Religious liberty, indeed, however firmly based on law and
political ideals, never became the habit of thought and action which
intolerance had been. A recurrent phenomenon of American life has been
the breaking up into religious, racial and sectional groups, with a
further synthesis of Americanization, through some common interest to
unite them. The conflict among the many groups prior to the adoption of
the Constitution, and its solution in that document with its Bill of
Rights, has been paralleled at least four times from that period to the
present day.
3.
These four reactions against the immigrant correspond with the four
peaks of the curve of immigration into the United States, with two
great alterations in the process, corresponding to the Civil War and
the World War.
Up till 1830, immigration into the United States was small in amount
and fairly regular. The first wave stretched from 1831 to 1861,
reaching its peak in 1855; its total amounted to four millions of
foreigners, of whom the largest group and the first to come were the
Irish, the second in number and date of arrival the Germans. The growth
of intolerance against these newcomers was shown in the movement known
as Know-Nothingism or the American Party. The second wave, of similar
nationalities, was from 1862 to 1877; the reply to this appeared in the
anti-alien planks in the political platforms of 1876. The third wave,
from 1878 to 1897, was larger than these earlier ones; it included
many Scandinavians and, after 1882, growing numbers of Italians,
Russians, and Austro-Hungarians, the two last being composed in part
of persecuted Jews, in part of impoverished peasants. The Nativist
reaction against this immigrant trend appears rather in the form of
religious opposition, for the American Protective Association of those
days was predominantly anti-Catholic. The fourth wave began in 1898
and extended until 1914, when the outbreak of the World War in Europe
caused a sudden drop to almost nothing; in its highest years, 1907 and
1913, more than 1,200,000 entered our ports annually; and the greatest
number of these new arrivals came from Italy, Austria-Hungary and
Russia. The reaction against these new immigrants was under way, but
the war interrupted its progress, and the Ku Klux Klan arrived at its
full power only after the war, when new conditions swayed the group
mind of America.
In each of these cases, the height of the movement against the
immigrant came just after the peak of the wave of immigration, at
the time when it had had time to impress itself on the native-born.
The philosophies of these four movements varied according to the
nationality of the immigrants against whom the natives were
protesting, and according to the general philosophy of life in vogue at
the time. The first such movement, the Know-Nothing or American Party,
originated in New York State in 1852 “as a secret organization with
passwords, oath, grip and ritual.”[65] Its creed was summed up in two
words: Americanism and Protestantism. Its special target was the two
million Irish who had come into the country; they were poor laborers,
with a low standard of living, ignorant, hereditary enemies of England,
and Catholics into the bargain. No wonder there were anti-Irish riots
in New York, Philadelphia and Boston; that it was rumored the Pope
would soon be dictator of America; or that the secret anti-alien
society was begun. But the course of the movement was spectacular and
brief. It entered national politics, thus both making bitter enemies
for itself and taking off the secrecy which was its chief source of
power. Then came the abolitionist movement, and the American party was
split into northern and southern branches. Most important of all, the
peak of immigration was passed, the Irish adopted the American standard
of living, became a part of communal life, without any danger of
Catholic overthrow of our cherished institutions—Othello’s occupation
was gone, and the Know-Nothing party disappeared.
The next wave of immigration and the next reaction against it were
minor ones. The immigrants met groups of their own origin already
absorbed into the common life of America, and fitted in with little
difficulty. The attempt in 1876 to prevent the use of public funds for
sectarian schools was itself comparatively slight.
But in between came the tremendous crisis of the Civil War. Here the
opposition was not between native and immigrant, but between north and
south, an industrial society of free laborers against an agricultural
society of castes,—planters, poor whites, and negro slaves. I shall
not go further into this conflict, because it is too familiar and
has comparatively little to do with the particular application of
my viewpoint. But, from our point of view, it is important to see
the place of the first Ku Klux Klan of 1865–71. This was again a
secret organization, adding the feature of disguise, for the terrifying
effect on the negroes whom it was the object of the Klan to overawe.
The Klan was a partisan and sectional organization, of Southern white
men of Confederate sympathies, to maintain their group supremacy over
the newly freed negroes and the “carpet baggers” from the North. The
victors had, as usual, indulged in oppression over the losers, and the
grievance was a very real one. The Klan was partially successful in its
object, but at once fell into numerous abuses, was used by partisans
to vent personal grudges, fell into the hands of a lawless element,
and was formally disbanded in 1871 by General Nathan B. Forrest, its
national commander or Grand Wizard. Its slogan of “white supremacy”
shows its animus against the negroes and the North, not against the
alien. Some of its partisans claim that the Klan did not disband when
it was formally ordered so to do, but persisted in its underground
activity until as late as 1877.[66] However that may be, its character
and purpose are very clear; it was sectional, timely, and for the one
aim of white supremacy. It appealed to its members and frightened its
enemies by its methods of disguise and secrecy, no less than by the
beatings, burnings and other outrages which were carried on either
under its auspices or by the false use of its insignia and methods. Its
defiance of the law imposed by force, and its use of force in reply,
are the vestiges of war psychology; It was the legitimate, if unlovely,
offspring of the Reconstruction. It had no function left when the white
South regained control of the states, but its memory still lingers as
part of the idealization of the “lost cause” of the Confederacy.
The third reaction against immigration was primarily anti-Catholic
in trend. This was the A. P. A., or American Protective Association,
another secret society, organized in 1887, which reached its greatest
popularity in 1894 and 1895. At this same period there were several
other societies with the same purpose, notably the National League
for the Protection of American Institutions, which had a number of
extremely prominent men among its members. At this time the
so-called “new immigration” was growing strong, with its large numbers
of Italian and Austrian Catholics, added to those of German and Irish
origin already on the ground. The old fear of political domination
by the Papacy, expressed at the time of the adoption of the first
amendment to the Constitution, and then refuted, was again revived.
There was an orgy of purported “confessions” of nuns and priests; there
was circulated a forged oath of the Knights of Columbus, in which
the members agreed to place the papal authority above their national
allegiance; and a false encyclical of Pope Leo XIII. Thousands of
patriotic Americans believed all this obvious nonsense, stirred up by
the fear of a dominant Church; the A. P. A. had as many as two million
members and threatened to drive out of public life the twelve million
Catholics then in the country, without regard to their race, nation,
service to America, or the number of generations they had lived in
the United States. The mob spirit, once aroused, crystalized in the
breaking of the Northern group mind of Civil War days into various
sub-groups, Catholic, anti-Catholic and indifferent. But the financial
panic of the 1890’s resulted in a sudden drop in immigration; the older
settlers learned English and were absorbed into the American cultural
group; the A. P. A. had no reason for existence, and again substantial
unity was achieved by the mind of the American people.
In this connection we must give a passing glance to what is still our
single greatest problem of groups, the existence of a ten per cent.
negro minority in the United States. These people were brought here
by force as slaves; as a subject class they were refused education,
though at the same time their own language, religion and customs were
thrown into disrepute and have been largely forgotten. Though freed
from economic slavery, they are still politically a subject class in
our southern states, while in northern and border states they are
gaining a political balance of power. Finally, they rest everywhere
under social disabilities, from the “Jim Crow” cars of the South to
the subtler distaste and ostracisms of the North. The result is that
they are forming complete, self-contained Negro communities within
the larger cities of the North and South alike; that they are growing
increasingly self-conscious as a group; and that the large number of
mulattoes, who in the British and French West Indies would rank as a
third group, between the racial divisions, are here forced to make
common cause with negroes. The negroes are thus a self-conscious group,
though their culture is imitative. The grouping of the negroes apart is
easy, on the whole, because of the gross external signs, such as skin
color and texture of hair, so that the mass of the whites of the United
States regard them definitely as a different and a lower race. That
anthropologists are not so certain of all this makes little difference,
because the group mind is based rather on old habits of thought than
on the understanding of new and difficult facts. Here seems a problem
of a different order, then, than the racial and religious groupings
of the sub-varieties of the white race, which are constantly being
overcome and regrouped in a larger union of social life. In this study
it will be impossible to do more than point out the existence of this
distinct problem, with its similar mental background to the rest but
its immeasurably more terrible implications.
The fourth wave of immigration was by far the greatest in number of
newcomers, and by far the most variegated in racial and national
composition. It brought a million a year or more for six years during
this period. And its members had 75% of persons from southern and
eastern Europe, while the immigration prior to 1890 had included only
20% of these races, and had been chiefly the English, Irish, Germans
and Scandinavians. It is no wonder that the race theory began to
be popular in America, under the spectacular leadership of Lothrop
Stoddard and Grant Madison, and that many began to agitate for a
greater or less limitation of the flood of immigration. Even so sober a
student of society as Professor Edward A. Ross of Wisconsin held that
it was wise to assimilate people of different group mind more slowly
than we were doing at the time. He said:
[67]There have come among us in the last half century more than twenty
million European immigrants with all manner of mental background, many
of them having tradition which will no more blend with American
traditions than oil will blend with water.
And he proceeded to point out their inexperience with democratic
institutions, their lack of respect for law and for women, their
disbelief in progress. In addition, we need only note that many of
these people were Catholics and Jews; the total number of the former
in the United States in 1923 being estimated at 18,000,000 and of the
latter at 3,600,000. And the Jews were far more conspicuous than their
numbers, on account of their massing in the great cities and their
concentration in certain lines of industry. Thus the ground was fully
prepared for a new anti-alien movement, expressing itself this time in
the form of efforts to restrict immigration. This movement was under
way in 1914, and would probably have followed in the course of its
precursors. But world-shaking events ensued which altered the course of
groups in America as well. The outbreak of the World War in 1914, the
entrance of the United States into the war in 1917, altered all groups,
profoundly affected the American group mind, and made the relation
between the sub-groups and the mind of America very different from what
it had been. The results of this process are still evident, and it is
among them that we can look for anti-Semitism, together with many other
types of intolerance and group opposition.